As well as the fact that acts of domestic violence,fatal or not,aren’t “odd” at all.They are frightenly common.The No.1 cause of death for pregnant women inthe US is being murdered by their babydaddy,you know? And statistically,the greatest danger to a child is posed by their immediate family.

Fritz,I think Melissa’s point is that the violent deaths of a woman and a child are being trivialized by being reported as “odd news”.

I understand that and agree with her.

However, I also think the problem is due in part to how Reuters classifies stories. The are likely given tags related to content and then aggregated using a content management system.

If they create a new tag that would exclude content from being aggregated with “Odd News,” they could prevent crimes against women and children from appearing in that category.

Then, when an editor reads a story in which a child is killed or a woman is raped, etc., he or she can tag it as “heinous” and it would be excluded from the Odd News category. Instead, it would be listed under the new category — one that is more appropriate for serious crimes.

As it is now, I could imagine Reuters including a story about a man being beaten and sodomized with a large dill pickle under Odd News.

Except in the entire time I’ve been paying attention to it, there’s never been a story like that about a man in the Odd News section, though there have been “violent, deadly, cruel, or otherwise physically damaging” crimes against men in the news during the same period.

I was (poorly) suggesting that the teleplay shows that this categorization of “odd news” isn’t entirely new.

I also would like to point out that the content that appears as Odd News is partially determined by the online readers.

All of these stories have been tagged according to content. If readers click through more often on stories that involve violent crime, those type of stories will be given more weight and will apear more often at the top of the category.

This is where automation needs to be trumped by EDITORIAL STANDARDS.

If there is a great deal of reader interest in violent, heinous crimes, rather than making that the new focus of the Odd News category, a new category should be created.

The standards that determine what is Odd News and what should be excluded from that category should be easy to set:

Except in the entire time I’ve been paying attention to it, there’s never been a story like that about a man in the Odd News section, though there have been “violent, deadly, cruel, or otherwise physically damaging” crimes against men in the news during the same period.

I think that is due to the fact that thise types of crimes against men are rare. I have read a story about a woman cutting off her husband’s penis and feeding it to chickens in Oddly Enough. But, how often does that happen? Once every 10 years?

People have a ghoulish attraction to these kinds of news stories. That’s why the True Crime genre is so popular. But, it is disturbing that violent crimes like those you’ve pointed out are included in the oddball category.

Each year, approximately 16,000 people are murdered in the United States. 7% of the killers are female.*

Who are these women and what drives them to kill? Oxygen’s hit true crime series Snapped in its 5th season, profiles the fascinating cases of women accused of murder. Did they really do it? And, if they did, why? Whether the motivation was revenge against a cheating husband, the promise of a hefty insurance payoff or putting an end to years of abuse, the reasons are as varied as the women themselves. From socialites to secretaries, female killers share one thing in common: at some point, they all Snapped.

I might be a touch jaded but I think anytime a “dinner guest” finds a couple of bodies in the freezer no matter who they happen to be it qualifies as odd news.

I think it was the dinner-party touch, rather than the bodies-stashed-in-freezer touch, that captures the ghoulish imagination. After all, there’s a whole story there in that one detail, that this man would not only kill his wife and son and stash their bodies in the freezer, but that he would host a dinner party while they’re in there and allow a guest to open the freezer.

What does that say about this man’s state of mind (not to mention about the size of his freezer)? And the idea that his friends could just stumble upon this double-murder by accident, while nothing is apparently out of the ordinary.

But, yeah: “odd news,” with all the connotations of quirkyness and giant pumpkins and thieves getting stuck in chimneys and incompetent bank robbers with distinctive facial birthmarks who rob the banks they are account holders at, does not exactly describe this kind of horror.

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